Auschwitz

After all our chores were completed we headed back to the Dizzy Daisy and chilled out until our tour picked us up and we were crammed into a completely full and really small minibus for the 1 hour drive to Auschwitz.

When we got there you could see the barbwire fences from the bus, to get to the main camp you go through a really empty and bleak building that serves as their reception and office building then we met up with a guide, got our headsets so he didn’t have to speak up and headed out to the camp. The first thing that you see is the gate, it’s pretty intimidating and you can’t help but imagine what it would be like for the inmates of the death camp when they first walked through that gate! It has writing on it that says in Nazi “work will set you free” kind of ironic as it was the inhumane working conditions that killed so many of the people that where imprisoned in the camp. The Guide showed us around the camp and took us into three buildings that had been setup as part of the museum. One was full of photos showing what the camp and it’s prisoners where like, this was pretty full on, the picture that I (Chris) remember the most was of a trainload of people who had just arrived at the camp and a Nazi “medical” officer stood arm outstretched pointing an old man to the right, this we were told meant that as he wasn’t well enough to be put to work he was going directly to the gas chamber. I (Em) am haunted by many of the photos we saw that day but a few that stand out are the ones of the children. It ripped my heart out seeing the photos of these children, just skin and bone, their eyes filled with fear and tears, their shaved heads, their number tattoos. I just wanted the photo to come alive to a degree so that I could jump into and rescue all these poor innocent babies from such horror. There were also photos taken of children being used for medical experiments, and the pain in their faces was too much for me to take. I couldn’t look, but then, I couldn’t turn away either. There was a family of triplets, all girls, and being used for medical experimentation, the little girl was 3 and looked as if she were 1, so tiny and so incredibly thin, just screaming. I know it’s horrible to read about and believe me, it’s hard to write about, as I type tears are welling and I feel such hate rising for those who inflicted such tremendous pain to these innocent people. There were also buildings here where they kept young women and did many many gynecological experiments on them. It is said that many died of the pain, many of the experiment its self and those who lived did so in pain for the rest of their lives and were never able to have children. Again, I feel so much hate for the ‘doctors’ who would do this.

The next building was full of things that were found in the camp when the Russians “liberated” the camp in 1945 there was rooms full of thousands of shoes, reading glasses and suitcases but the most horrible part was the massive room full of tones of human hair, the Russians found bags and bags of it in the camp. They shaved the heads of all the inmates and kept the long hair of the woman and sent it back to Germany for recycling, this was truly disgusting. The smell also was rather gut turning. You can smell this room long before you see it and as you walk up the stairs you can’t help but think “ohhh god, that’s a horrible moth ball smell” because that’s what it reminds you of, but then, as you get closer it begins to smell more musty, dusty and old, and then you see all this hair, it really is repulsive. The hair is obviously all very old now and decaying and it is all one colour which is like a dirty brown/grey colour. It is a sight that I think will stay with us for a long time.

The last building we went into in Auschwitz 1 was kept original and was the building used for punishment and solitary confinement, it had some pretty nasty cells in the basement that where very much like what we witnessed at the “House of Terror” museum in Budapest which is all pretty nasty stuff. In the court yard of this building was the ‘execution’ wall. Here they would execute many many people by shooting. They would always start with the women first apparently. They would make all those being executed strip off, wash down, shave their heads and then march them out to the wall. They would often make two people face one another and then shoot them at point blank range, killing both inmates with one bullet. Some times they would kill whole families as well. Making them line up, all naked and shaved and they would start by shooting the youngest to the oldest in turn. It was very difficult to be in this court yard and to see the ‘preparation’ room.

The final part of your Auschwitz 1 tour is a visit to the original gas chamber and as we walked down into this I felt my heart rate rise and I clung to Chris tightly. While it is not so much scary it is completely overwhelming and you can’t help but put yourself in the prisoners’ shoes. How they must have felt being marched into this large room naked and with a shaved head, being herded into the room until you were being crushed, in pitch darkness, then this confusion as they waited for their ‘shower’ (this was often what they were told they were off to have) then having this gas come over you, the panic they must have felt, the crush that must have happened as they raced in the darkness to the direction of the door they remembered coming in through, but not being able to make it, the fear, the screams, the pain, the crying… it’s all too much to think of. You then walk through into the crematorium where there are large clay ovens deep enough and big enough for up to 5 people to be burnt in there together. There were often too many bodies though and not enough ovens so there was also a ‘storing room’ where they kept the bodies until they could be burnt and then forgotten. It was horrible and while I wanted to run from there, I wanted to stay and just say “I’m so sorry” to the room and to remember and pay respect to those who came into, but not out of, that room.

After Auschwitz 1 we hopped back on the bus and drove the 2-3km’s to Auschwitz 2 or Bireme as it’s also known. This was the concentration camp that was ‘home’ to millions and millions of Jews and prisoners. It is completely over whelming here, there are sheds that housed these people, little look out towers and barb wire fences as far as the eye can see, and running through all this are train tracks. The train tracks that brought millions upon millions of innocent people of all ages, abilities and backgrounds to their death.

To the left of this camp is where they housed the women prisoners, which apparently was never as full as the right side (the men’s side) as a) most women were sentenced to the gas chamber within hours of arriving as they were either, too old, too frail, pregnant or a mother (meaning the children were also sentenced straight to the gas chamber) and b) because the women that were allowed to ‘live’ were put to hard work and due to the combination of hard labour work and no food would become more frail than the men more quickly and therefore pass away sooner. Apparently in the evenings when the women were coming back from working in the fields all day with no food or water, the soldiers would hold a stick at a certain height and make the prisoners ‘jump’ over this and if they could not make it they were taken to ‘another camp’ never to be seen again. The women’s side was also vastly emptier as the women just didn’t have any ‘fight’ in them as the guide said. He (the tour guide) asked us to look at the photos of the men prisoners and the women prisoners, and asked us to look into their eyes. He asked us if we saw the difference, and you do straight away. The men all seem to have this ‘determination and pride’ in their eyes, they do not look as if they are going to be beaten, no matter how skinny, or frail or physically beaten they are, they will not give up, they still have spirit. However the women, their eyes seemed to be filled with fear, sadness, depression, tears, terror and it just looks, in their eyes, as if they’ve given up. There are a exceptions to this though, their were at least 6 photos of women that I saw where they had that same look in their eye as the men and everything about me said “good on you girl” but I know in my heart that these women, no matter how much spirit they had, most probably went the same way the others did.

The men’s side of the camp, to the right, is much much larger and here we had a tour inside the sheds. These sheds were originally built to house 52 horses, they were stables for pure breeds, but they were taken over and turned into the ‘homes’ for millions of prisoners. As I said, they were meant to house 52 horses and instead, they housed 400 men. We were taken into one of these sheds that had been left the way it was when liberated (albeit a bit cleaner) but the ‘beds’ and stove etc were all left, and the ‘toilet’ in the corner. While in their you again can’t help but look about and instantly start thinking “right, how would I break out? Where would I hide the ‘illegal’ contraband? How and where would I have made a hole for more airflow? And it is so easy for us today, who are well and educated and who have never experienced the horror of war, to stand there and say “well, why didn’t they just cause a mutiny and rebel and take on the guards? There were millions of them and only a few hundred guards, what was wrong with them, why did they give up?” and “If I were here I would have done this, that or the other…” but no one today, of our generation, will never understand, nor I hope ever experience first hand such terror, horror and fear. Visiting this place has opened our eyes to how lucky and blessed we are, how we take things for granted on a daily basis and just how much freedom we have, so while it was a sad and hard visit to make and it was emotionally and spiritually depressing, it was an experience that I feel was a necessary one and a good one, to help us realize the history and how blessed we are.

It also has to be mentioned, that while taking these tours the sky was completely jet black and lighting zig zagged across the sky in regular intervals, as we had taken a later tour it was getting darker and darker also, and by the time we got to part 2 of our tour the gates had closed to regular tourists, and our group was the only one walking around the camp, which was a little spooky! It was so quiet and still and all you could hear was the rumble of thunder before a crack of lightening, it all added to the spookiness of the experience!

written by  Chris and Emily on June 29, 2009 from Krakow, Poland
from the travel blog: Europe 2009
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